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Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
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Wednesday, March 03, 2010

The Olympics is now over and which place your country has ended up in depends on the ranking system used. The usual way to judge a country's place is to simply add up the total number of medals as seen here.

Most of the time this is a fairly accurate assessment, but using the total number of medals a country can gain a fairly high place simply by getting a large number of bronzes. Russia (3 gold, 5 silver, 7 bronze) is above Korea (6 gold, 6 silver, 2 bronze) and Switzerland (6 gold, 3 bronze) is under France (2 gold, 3 silver, 6 bronze) when we all know that a country would rather walk out with six gold medals than six bronze but a slightly higher total.

The other way of judging rank is also inaccurate. Here's a chart with countries judged by the number of gold medals, with other medals relegated to the status of tie-breakers. My country Canada gets on top for its 14 gold medals, but it won a full 11 medals less than the US which only gets third place because it doesn't have enough gold. And on that chart poor Finland gets beaten by Latvia (total of two medals, both silver) because it got one silver and six bronze medals. Great Britain (one single gold medal and nothing else, WTF?) also gets ranked above Japan with three silver and two bronze.

So let's use a point system. 3 points for gold, 2 points for silver, one point for bronze. In case of a tie we let the highest-ranking medal decide the rank. Here's how the ranking works when this happens. Red indicates that a country's ranking suffers against the new system, and green the opposite. The depth of the colour indicates the difference. Notice that countries with medals heavily stacked to one side or the other (lots of gold or lots of bronze, but little else) show the largest difference when the new system is brought in. Also, rank #25 isn't included here because counting by total number of medals only gives 24 places as a many countries are tied.

Country

Gold

Silver

Bronze

Points

Rank

Rank by total

Rank by gold

United States

9

15

13

70

1

1

3

Germany

10

13

7

63

2

2

2

Canada

14

7

5

61

3

3

1

Norway

9

8

6

49

4

4

4

Korea

6

6

2

32

5

7

5

Austria

4

6

6

30

6

5

9

Russia

3

5

7

26

7

6

11

China

5

2

4

23

8

8

7

Sweden

5

2

4

23

8

8

7

Switzerland

6

0

3

21

10

11

6

Netherlands

4

1

3

17

11

12

10

France

2

3

6

16

12

8

12

Poland

1

3

2

11

13

13

15

Czech Republic

2

0

4

10

14

13

14

Italy

1

1

3

8

15

15

16

Japan

0

3

2

8

16

15

20

Australia

2

1

0

7

17

18

13

Belarus

1

1

1

6

18

18

17

Slovakia

1

1

1

6

18

18

17

Finland

0

1

4

6

20

15

24

Croatia

0

2

1

5

21

18

21

Slovenia

0

2

1

5

21

18

21

Latvia

0

2

0

4

23

23

23

Great Britain

1

0

0

3

24

24

19

Estonia

0

1

0

2

25

24

25

Kazakhstan

0

1

0

2

25

24

25

And there we have it, problem solved. Finland is no longer robbed of four places for not having won gold, nor is it given five places simply for racking up a lot of medals, and the same is true to a lesser extent with Russia and Japan. Switzerland is now not rewarded unduly for having a lot of golds, nor is it unfairly penalized by simply counting up the total and making its first-place finishes virtually meaningless.

Now that the post is done, let's check to see if anyone has proposed this system before, since though I came up with it myself I'm sure it isn't the first time anyone has thought of it from 1896 until now.

Checking...yes, looks like it was proposed in 2004 (careful, that's a pdf) by the Australian Geography Teachers Association. Looks like now it's supported by both the AGTA, and Page F30.

3
comments:

Actually, this is the way we calculate totals in Australia for all olympic events for as long as I can remember. (We refer to total #gold as the 'american' method, and generally acknowledge it as being stupid - you should move to Australia)

Actually, this is the way we calculate totals in Australia for all olympic events for as long as I can remember. (We refer to total #gold as the 'american' method, and generally acknowledge it as being stupid - you should move to Australia)